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Review | Sons of the Neon Night movie review: Hong Kong crime thriller is a striking watch
Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Ka-fai are joined by a host of stars in Juno Mak’s crime thriller set in an alternate 1994 Hong Kong
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3.5/5 stars
Few Hong Kong films have arrived with as much anticipation as Juno Mak Chun-lung’s Sons of the Neon Night. A hyper-stylised crime thriller with a reported HK$400 million (US$51.4 million) budget and a star-studded cast, it was shot between 2017 and 2018 only to be shelved until its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year.
The long delay has only added to the film’s enigmatic aura. Set in an alternate-reality Hong Kong of 1994, so much has transpired in the interim that the brooding noir now feels less like a follow-up to Mak’s 2013 directorial debut, the horror gem Rigor Mortis, and more like a relic from an unknown past.
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The film’s most famous composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, died in 2023; its lead, Takeshi Kaneshiro, has not appeared on screen since 2017; and Hong Kong cinema itself, amid a shifting political landscape, has ceased to worship criminals so charismatic or policemen this utterly corrupt.
Kaneshiro plays Moreton, the younger of two sons of a kingpin whose pharmaceutical empire is partly built on drug trafficking. When the ageing patriarch is secretly detained in a hospital, succession becomes an issue as his fugitive elder son, Maddox, is the favoured heir despite being a wanted man.
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